It is well recognized that there is potential hazard, particularly for young children, if they are able to remove the closure cap from a bottle or container which may contain medicine or a toxic material or the like. Child resistant packaging or CR packaging is special packaging used to reduce the risk of children ingesting dangerous items. This is often accomplished by the use of a special safety cap. It is required by regulation for prescription drugs, over-the-counter medication, pesticides, and household chemicals.
Recently, there has been a desire to create child resistant safety caps for other consumer products such as eye drops. These products are often sold in small packages. Eye drops, for example, are often sold in containers as small as 5 to 20 milliliters. The packages often have eye droppers attached to their open end for dosing the container contents.
Child resistant safety caps often comprise a two-cap structure or closure. The “two-cap” structure being a structure or closure having an inner closure cap and a separate, non-interconnected, non-integral outer cap, the caps rotatable with respect to each other and both having interengaging components so that rotation of the outer cap in a clockwise direction will simultaneously and in unison rotate the inner cap to readily secure the inner cap to the neck of a bottle or container. The inner cap, however cannot be unthreaded or disengaged from the neck of the bottle or container unless an axial or a radial manual pressure is applied against the outer cap to produce an interengagement between the engaging means on the inner and outer caps so that they operate in unison when rotated counter-clockwise to thereby disengage the inner cap from the container. When an axial pressure is applied against the outer cap to produce the interengagement, the cap is known as a push-and-turn child resistant closure. When a radial pressure is applied against the outer cap to produce the interengagement, the cap is known as a squeeze-and-turn child resistant closure.
These two-cap structures are typically large in size when compared to those used for small containers such as dropper containers (e.g., eye or ear drop containers). Because of this typically “larger” size, mechanistic deficiencies in the two-cap structures may be less noticeable than in smaller two-cap structures. Therefore, there is a need for child resistant safety caps improving the mechanical interaction of the two-cap structures whether large in size or smaller in size—such as for dropper containers.